Effort in class isn’t for the teacher. You’re the one who has to live with the brain you build.

Schoolwork gets framed as a transaction with an adult, which makes it easy to treat as something done to you. The adult goes home either way. What you are assembling is the set of things you can think with, and you take that into every room afterwards. Nobody else is affected by it much at all.

Pick one class and work in it as though there were no grade attached, just for two weeks. Notice how different it feels to be building rather than complying. That difference is usually what people mean by finally caring.